Harish Hande, who was one of the Magsaysay awardees this year, co-founded SELCO that has been working to provide solar lighting in rural areas of Karnataka. In this Idea Exchange moderated by Special Correspondent Amitabh Sinha, Hande speaks about the potential of solar energy.

Amitabh Sinha: Harish Hande is working to provide energy solutions, mainly to the underprivileged. He has been in this business for about 18 years but unfortunately, we got to know of him only after he won the Magsaysay Award. Tell us about your work.

Harish Hande: What we do is very simple: we provide sustainable energy solutions, basically solar power, to rural villages, individual households, street vendors, schools. Most of our work is in Karnataka but a few years ago, we started work in Gujarat too. Our primary focus is the individual household. We started with a concept to destroy three myths: that the poor cannot afford technologies, the poor cannot maintain technologies and thirdly, that you can’t start a commercial venture while trying to meet social objectives.\

Subscribe

About

The Atomic Age is an ongoing project that aims to cultivate critical and reflective intervention regarding nuclear power and weapons. We provide daily news updates on the issues of nuclear energy and weapons, primarily though not exclusively in English and Japanese via RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. If you would like to receive updates in English only, subscribe to this RSS.

Choose Language / 言語

Additional Notes / 謝辞

The artwork in the header, titled "JAPAN:Nuclear Power Plant," is copyright artist Tomiyama Taeko.

The photograph in the sidebar, of a nuclear power plant in Byron, Illinois, is copyright photographer Joseph Pobereskin (http://pobereskin.com/)

This website was designed by the Center for East Asian Studies, the University of Chicago, and is administered by Masaki Matsumoto, Graduate Student in the Masters of Arts Program for the Social Sciences, the University of Chicago.

Contact / 連絡先

If you have any questions, please contact the Center for East Asian Studies, the University of Chicago at 773-702-2715 or japanatchicago@uchicago.edu.